Background Cities in developing countries are upgrading their public transport at unprecedented rates in efforts to create transportation systems that are more sustainable and equitable. South Africa and India are seeing massive investments in features that are improving operational characteristics of public transport systems. However, more effort will need to be expended in improving public transport access/egress conditions, in order to ensure that public transport is a competitive alternative to door to door motorised transport trips. Particular attention will need to be paid to non-motorised transport, as it is the most common means of access/egress for people in the Global South, despite conditions for pedestrians being uncomfortable and a threat to their safety and security. Traditional methods of evaluating the accessibility of public transport stations have been found to be overly mechanistic. Through improved operationalisation of built environment factors and crowd sourcing user perceptions, a better understanding of how supportive the built environment is for walking can be achieved. Study details This study presents the following: 1. The development and testing of an Android mobile phone application, along with its associated online dashboard. The mobile phone application allows for the collection of data on the pedestrian experience and is a shift away from the mechanistic approach to understanding pedestrian challenges. Using the application, users rate their walking environment along dimensions of safety, security, infrastructure and comfort, while geo-tagging walking routes. The dashboard is used to store and visualise the users’ perception data and multimedia captured using the mobile phones. 2. A proposed spatial analysis method, using Spatial Clustering Algorithms for analysing data captured using the mobile phone application. As crowd sourced datasets are very large, filtering approaches may not be capable of distinguishing between outliers and clusters of high/low ratings. Thus, more robust analysis methods are required in order to extract meaningful insights. 3. The piloting of the application and proposed spatial analysis method in Cape Town and New Delhi Results of pilot studies Six public transport locations across Cape Town and New Delhi were chosen for the pilot studies. Survey facilitators, with the application preloaded on mobile phones, intercepted public transport users travelling along their egress trips. Respondents were asked to make use of the application to report on their perception of the walking environment as they were escorted to their destination. Data from 538 egress trips were mapped and analysed. The application was able to capture nuances associated with the pedestrian experience, which may not be possible using traditional approaches. The challenges identified by respondents ranged from pedestrian infrastructure not being accessible due to road traffic violations by motorised transport, to pedestrians having to deal with filthy walking environments that made walking uncomfortable. Future work would need to consider the incorporation of video into the mobile application. Video would allow for the capturing of dynamic challenges faced by pedestrians, such as aggressive behaviour by motorists, which cannot be captured using pictures and voice notes. An addition consideration for future work would be to make the application available to the general public so that data can be truly crowd sourced. This would require investment in marketing the application and the study. Alternatively, future studies may look to make use of systematic random sampling of egress trips and larger sample sizes, in order for results to be representative.

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